CIRCLE Blog

According to our estimates, youth political engagement in the 2018 midterm elections was among the highest in recent decades. An estimated 31% turned out to vote, compared to 21% in 2014. In addition, beyond the ballot box, our pre-election survey of youth suggests that youth activism is on the rise, with the percentage of youth Read More >

Note: This post has been updated with additional data and methodological details. Across the country, young people had a profound impact on the 2018 midterm elections. CIRCLE’s exclusive day-after estimate found that 31% of young people voted in Tuesday’s midterms, the highest rate in over two decades. Furthermore, according to national exit polls, young people Read More >

CIRCLE is estimating today that roughly 31% of youth (ages 18-29) turned out to vote in the 2018 midterms, an extraordinary increase over our estimate in 2014, when our day-after exit poll calculation suggested that 21% of eligible young voters went to the polls. We estimate that this is by far the highest level of Read More >

Note: The data below is current as of 9:00 a.m. ET on November 7. CIRCLE’s election-night analysis of exit poll data suggests that young people made up a similar share of the electorate than in previous midterms (compared to the same data source in previous years), an impressive feat in what has all the signs Read More >

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, exit polls came under fire for their perceived deficiencies in accurately surveying the American electorate. According to an analysis by Thomas Edsall of the New York Times, that year’s exit polls undersampled white working-class voters and oversampled college-educated voters, thereby biasing the data and overestimating Democratic turnout.[1] Read More >